Monday, 1 May 2017

The Failure of New Third Ways over Brexit.

The reappearance of a New Labour grandee such as Gordon
Brown, not quite as discredited as Blair, but nevertheless tainted by
the damage the regime he helped lead and which caused Brexit, is
going to be treated with contempt. This latest 'third way' vision he is
peddling is so much tired 'framing' rhetoric.

It was better in the past. People entered politics or achieved high
office later in life. It meant that after quitting or being removed from
front line politics, they either retired to country cottages out of
public view, wrote their memoirs or died. But Brown really still does
believe he is a 'cutting edge' contributor to politics.

The irony is that voices from the past in the past usually had
something relatively wise to counsel. Those like Blair and Brown have
shown show an embarrassing rapid obsolescence in the age of consumerism
and sound bite politics that they were the hideous embodiment of being,
though Brown was always far less slick.

Brown's new 'third way', a compromise between Britain and the EU
involving Scotland and repatriation of powers to Edinburgh from Brussels
obviously makes the cause for sovereignty and decentralisation of
decision making back without explaining why it was ever a good reason to
give them away in the first place.

The idea that the EU having more powers than Britain because of being
centralised in London rather gives the game away : that handing powers
over to Brussels in the name of 'pooled sovereignty' or 'subsidiarity'
was at least partly about 'defeating Tory extremism' from the 1980s
right through to the present 'Hard Brexit'.

This reflects the fact the Labour Party was so useless in challenging
the Conservatives until it repackaged itself as New Labour. It designed
devolution and its overtly pro-EU stance as much for reasons of a rapid power
grab than due to any genuine idealism and centralised much
authoritarian power.

Brown spins his plan as 'patriotic' as opposed to an 'extreme' of
'nationalism'. The fact is though that Brexit is symptomatic of a
continent wide rejection of EU federalism and no 'third way' is going to
effectively keep Britain in the EU, as it is currently set up, when in
any case its destiny is now clearly fragmentation.

Brexit is an irreversible process as part of the sea change in
politics across Europe that progressives are at a loss to comprehend as their world
collapses around them. There are no 'third ways' of the sort Brown is
peddling as abstract and makeshift panaceas to help, as much as
anything, safeguard his wretched 'legacy' in politics.

This means that Brexit is certain and Scotland could indeed vote for
independence once Britain leaves the EU. Anatol Lieven has written,

'Charting a British national identity and role will be of paramount
importance to this country but also to Europe—of which we were part
before we joined the EU and of which we will remain part. It is in many
ways tragic that the idea of a European federal state has failed; but
failed it has.

We appear to be heading for something closer to Charles de Gaulle’s
vision of a L’Europe des patries, co-operative and at peace, but made up
of independent states. In such a Europe Britain will still play a vital
part, and we need to think how to make it a positive one—especially if
the American role in the continent is going to decline steeply.

One of the reasons why it is so important to think of Britain’s (or
England’s, if the Scots leave the union) identity as a nation is that in
Europe and throughout the world, the future clearly belongs to nations
and their supporting nationalisms.

It is now obvious that while the
threat of war between countries has thankfully been banished in Western
Europe at least, and close links have grown up between nations there,
the vast majority of Europeans remain loyal to their own nation state.

Britain is not a nation-state and never has been. It is a dynastic
union of states. The Scottish people had their referendum in 2014 and
voted to remain in the UK. The UK referendum on remaining in the EU in 2016 saw
Scottish voters voting as British citizens because a majority had voted
to stay within the UK.

With US influence declining and the return of independent nation
states, it is likely that Scots would decide to retain their position as
part of the UK. But the EU that Sturgeon wants to become more deeply a
part of, simply as a means to reject the UK in general, England in
particular and to grab complete power, is disappearing.

As the EU fragments, Great Power politics returns. With
uncertainty and danger returning to global power politics, most Scots
are more likely to want to stay within a union far older than the one
that grew up for a short historical period after the Second World War
and one that historically was a success.

Total Pageviews

About the Blog

This blog is mostly about the New Great Game for resources across the globe, the impact of oil and gas dependency upon both Britain and the oil rich nations, the purported interconnections between foreign policy and terrorism, the growth of Islamism and the mendacious nature of much 'Public Diplomacy'. It also seeks to anticipate the forthcoming threats to world peace by discerning the true nature of the new emerging psychopathologies that come with the struggle over diminishing natural resources, global warming, proxy conflicts and the prospect of civilisational collapse in regions such as the Middle East, Central Africa and the Maghreb.